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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Palestinian Suffering Used to Demonize Israel, by Efraim Karsh

No sooner had Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to stop the
sustained rocket and missile attacks on its civilian population by the
Gaza-based Hamas terror organization than it came under a barrage of
international criticism, with tens of thousands of violent demonstrators
flocking into the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Oslo, Sydney,
Buenos Aires and New York, among other places, to demand an end to the
"Gaza slaughter."

How can this be? Why do citizens of democratic societies
enthusiastically embrace one of the world's most murderous Islamist
terror organizations, overtly committed not only to the destruction of a
sovereign democracy but also to the subordination of Western values and
ways of life to a worldwide Islamic caliphate (or umma)? Not out of a
genuine concern for Palestinian wellbeing. For although the "Palestine
question" has received extraordinary media coverage for decades to the
exclusion of far worse humanitarian and political problems, the truth is
that no one really cares about the fate of the Palestinians: not their
leaders, who have immersed their hapless constituents in disastrous
conflicts rather than seize the numerous opportunities for statehood
since the Peel Commission report of 1937; not the Arab states, which
have brazenly manipulated the Palestinian cause to their self-serving
ends; and not Western politicians, the media, NGOs, human rights
activists, and church leaders enticed into self-righteous indignation by
any Israeli act of self-defense.
Had the Palestinians' dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other
non-Jewish adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the
interest that it presently does. No one in the international community
pays any attention to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians across the Arab
world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, which deprives its 500,000-strong
Palestinian population of the most basic human rights from property
ownership, to employment in numerous professions, to free movement. Nor
has there been any international outcry when Arab countries have
expelled and/or massacred their Palestinian populations on a grand
scale. The fact that the thoroughly westernized King Hussein of Jordan
killed more Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel had
in decades was never held against him or dented his widely held
perception as a man of peace.
As the supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist Robert Fisk put it in his memoirs, King Hussein was "often difficult to fault."
Kuwait's 1991 slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians who
lived and worked in the emirate (and the expulsion of most of its
400,000-strong Palestinian population) passed virtually unnoticed by the
international media, as has the murder of thousands of Palestinians in
the ongoing Syrian civil war and the reduction of countless others to
destitution and starvation.
By contrast, any Palestinian or Arab casualty inflicted by Israel comes under immediate international criticism.
Take the blanket media coverage of Israel's military response in
Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008- 09, 2012) but not of the original
Hezbollah and Hamas attacks triggering it, in stark contrast to the
utter indifference to bloodier conflicts going on around the world at
the same time. On July 19, 2006, for example, 5,000 Ethiopian troops
invaded Somalia in what it claimed was an action to "crush" an Islamist
threat to its neighbor's government. A month later, Sri Lankan artillery
has pounded territory held by the rebel Tamil Tigers resulting in mass
displacement and over 500 deaths, including an estimated 50 children
following the Sri Lankan air force's bombing of an orphanage. But
neither of these events gained any media coverage, let alone emergency
sessions of the UN Security Council, just as the bloodbath in Iraq at
the time, with its estimated 3,000 deaths a month at the hands of
Islamist militants sank into oblivion while the world focused on
Lebanon, just as the current slaughter in Syria and Iraq is presently
ignored.
And what about the-then long-running genocide in Darfur, with its
estimated 300,000 dead and at least 2.5 million refugees? Or the war in
the Congo, with over four million dead or driven from their homes, or in
Chechnya where an estimated 150,000- 160,000 have died and up to a
third of the population has been displaced, at the hands of the Russian
military? None of these tragedies saw the worldwide mass demonstrations
as has been the case during the Lebanon and Gaza crises.
Nor should we forget that Hezbollah has been implicated in dozens of international terror attacks from Brussels to Buenos Aires.
Indeed, the response to its July 18, 1994, terror attack on the
Israeli- Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), a social center catering
for Buenos Aires' large Jewish population, provides an illuminating
contrast to the relentless coverage of the 2006 events in Lebanon. It
was the worst terror attack in Argentina's history, killing 100 people
and wounding more than 200. More died in this bombing than in any single
action in the 2006 Lebanese war. Yet the BBC, which prides itself on
the worldwide coverage, didn't find the atrocity worth mentioning in its
evening news bulletin. When confronted with a complaint by the normally
timid Board of Deputies, British Jewry's umbrella organization, the
corporation offered an apology of sorts, blaming the omission on a
particularly busy day.
What were those daily events that could have possibly diverted the
BBC's attention from the Argentina massacre? A perusal of the papers
reveals the British premier of Steven Spielberg's new film, The
Flintstones, attended by the prince of Wales. This was also the day when
Gavin Sheerard- Smith, caned and imprisoned for six months in Qatar
after being convicted of buying and selling alcohol, returned to Britain
professing his innocence, and when David MacGregor, an agoraphobia
sufferer jailed for a fortnight for failing to pay poll tax arrears, had
his sentenced quashed. An eventful day indeed.
Given the BBC's indifference to the massacre of Argentinean Jews by
Hezbollah, it is hardly surprising that the corporation, along with much
of the world's media, ignored the almost daily rocket attacks by the
same group on Israel's northern border, not to mention the constant
outpouring of rockets and missiles from Gaza since the Israeli
withdrawal from the territory in 2005.
And why shouldn't they? The killing of Jews and the destruction or
seizure of their worldly properties is hardly news. For millennia Jewish
blood has been cheap, if not costless, throughout the Christian and
Muslim worlds where the Jew became the epitome of powerlessness, a
perpetual punching bag and a scapegoat for whatever ills befell society.
There is no reason, therefore, why Israel shouldn't follow in the
footsteps of these past generations, avoid antagonizing its Arab
neighbors and exercise restraint whenever attacked. But no, instead of
knowing its place, the insolent Jewish state has forfeited this historic
role by exacting a price for Jewish blood and beating the bullies who
had hitherto been able to torment the Jews with impunity. This dramatic
reversal of history cannot but be immoral and unacceptable. Hence the
global community outrage and hence the world's media provision of
unlimited resources to cover every minute detail of Israel's
"disproportionate" response, but none of the suffering and devastation
on the Israeli side.
A profoundly depressing state of affairs indeed. But so long as the
Palestinians continue to serve as the latest lightning rod against the
Jews, their supposed victimization reaffirming the latter's millenarian
demonization, Israel will never be allowed to defend itself without
incurring the charge of "disproportionate force" – never directed
against any other besieged democracy but evocative of the classic
anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as both domineering and wretched, both
helpless and bloodthirsty. In the words of the renowned American writer
David Mamet, "The world was told Jews used this blood in the performance
of religious ceremonies. Now, it seems, Jews do not require the blood
for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the ground."

The author is professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, a senior researcher at
the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Middle East
Forum, and the author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale, 2010).